This Interactive Orchestra Gives You The Chance To Control Music And Learn About The World At The Same Time

You won't want to stop listening to the music.

It was only a year ago that Daniel Land worked with an orchestra. Now, the composer's latest project is online for everyone to see with one catch: the audience gets to pick and choose how the music plays.

Expedia UK created World In Tune, an interactive music project that allows people to pick and choose the order in which they can play 16 different instruments.

Musicians from countries such as Portugal and Nigeria perform a piece of music in a pre-recorded YouTube video that plays on a loop as users pick between what instruments they want to play, ultimately putting together their own orchestral composition.

Matt Lindley, who worked on the project, said Expedia UK's initial goal was to create a piece that would allow people to discover different parts of the world through a variety of musical instruments in the same way people learn about countries through food and historical monuments.

"There's also the implications of music as a language which can transcend cultures and be understood by everyone around the world," he says to A Plus. "This idea seemed appealing at a time when it sometimes feels like the world isn't listening to each other much."

World In Tune was new territory for Land. In order to prepare for the collaboration, he recorded a demo where he played all of the instruments and experimented with the sound until he was happy enough to send it to the rest of the group. Since the music was not constricted to a particular rhythm or beat, Land gave the musicians leeway to improvise some of the sound and leave room for some silence.

"This kind of music can easily sound too cluttered," he said, "so a lot of the compositional process was subtractive rather than additive."

Although one of Land's challenges in creating this composition was a language barrier between him and some of the musicians, he learned that an interactive project is best handled by providing a framework to the work and not dwelling on miniscule details.

"Working on the piece reiterated to me how rich and effective the results can be from working with people who are good at what they do," he says. "I'm sure that most of the reason why the piece works is because the musicians were allowed a little room to put their personal stamp on things."

According to Land, the reception to World In Tune has been a positive one so far. He hopes that people who continue to discover the project have fun and experiment with sounds from around the world.

"Spreading the composition out across 16 independently looping videos means that every viewer will have a slightly different listening experience than the rest," he says, "there really is no one 'definitive' version of the piece, and each viewer makes their own "mix" every time it's set in motion."